In his lecture, Alberto Manguel considers the implications of the eighteenth-century work of Raimondo di Sangro, Prince of Sansevero, on a curious system of communication employed by the Incas consisting of rows of colored knots. Raimondo di Sangro was an eccentric inventor, printer, and visionary who imagined a method for deciphering this language and opened questions about the use of memory and the transmission of meaning.

Alberto Manguel, an Argentinian-born writer, has written twenty works on literature and reading, including The Dictionary of Imaginary Places with Gianni Guadalupi, A History of Reading, and The Library at Night. He has edited more than twenty literary anthologies and is the author of five novels, including the award-winning News for a Foreign Country Came.

This lecture is free and open to the public.